As usual, here’s my gleanings from the forest floor of the Pagan interwebs this week:

The brilliant Yewtree (Yvonne Aburrow) of Dowsing for Divinity reminded me this week of their excellent post, The Landscape of Gender, which probably unconsciously inflenced my own Gender is an Ocean post. This is just wonderful – I love the metaphor of a landscape (and accompanying map from Dru Marland) as a way of describing and looking at gender. Unlike a linear “spectrum”, a landscape can be moved around freely, explored, visited, lived in and lived with.

And in this case, there’s a great touch of whimsy that the usual super serious discussions of gender don’t always allow for, but which speaks to the playfulness of gender as it is performed. Who wouldn’t want to visit one of these places?

“Perhaps we could reimagine gender as a landscape. The mountains of the Fierce Femmes. Little Cisgender on the Wold. The village of Enby. The river of Genderfluid. Much Genderqueer in the Marsh. The valley of the Otters, near Bear Forest.”

…I experience a sense of place and belonging, when Poe and I walk through our neighborhood. I’m grounded, connected, and relating with intention to the human and more-than-human world around me.”

Mark Green of Atheopaganism has shared the text of his talk from the recent Pantheacon conference; Facing Forward: A Talk on Nontheist Paganism. I am somewhat in awe of the work that Mark has done to not only create Atheopaganism as its own path, but to demonstrate and advocate for the inclusion and acceptance of non-theist Pagans within the wider Pagan community.

“If I were creating a religious path today–and I am– I would make its cosmology that which science teaches us. I wouldn’t ask people to believe in unlikely and unsupported theories like gods and afterlives and cosmic battles of good versus evil and the like. I would ask them only to believe what we know with high degrees of confidence to be true: that the Universe is made of matter and energy, that everything in it obeys physical laws, that intelligence is found only in complex biological neural nets. I would ask that people think critically and skeptically, and take nothing on faith. I would ask them to see the wonder and majesty of the Cosmos as it is, without gilding the lily with unlikely additions.”

Dana at The Druid’s Garden continues the theme of her much-needed and deeply thoughtful writing about how Druidry can be of value in today’s climate crisis world, with her latest post, Druidry for the 21st Century: Druidry in the Anthropocene. This, and other articles on the site, is some of the most important and useful writing about Druidry I’ve ever seen, and it’s worth paying attention to.

“Druidry is about nature and relationship. Its about your relationship with nature both exoterically (that is, in the material world) and esoterically (that is, in the world of spirit). In the case of this information, I think it’s really important that we develop a range of responses, both esoteric and exoteric. In terms of the outer world, I’ve long advocated on this blog a very wide variety of things that can aid the land in healing, regeneration, and growth. I think that each of us can do something, and that something varies based on our life circumstances. All of us can attend to our ecological footprint, consumption behaviors, transit, energy use, and all of the usual things. I think that’s part of just being a druid–living your practice.”